Browsing through the biblioblogosphere I discovered very helpful information in the article Widgets, and Widgetry for Librarians: Copy, Paste, and Relax. This article is available in the magazine Mutimedia & Internet @ Schools. The author of the article explains how librarians can make their library’s website attractive to students with dynamic and changing content. Not many skills are needed, just simply cutting and pasting. Very encouraging!
This article includes a list of different tools that can be easily used to customize websites. The use of online videos–YouTube, blip.tv, Google Video, TeacherTube, is recommended as one to start practicing. For easy chatting, the meebo me widget is considered a handy tool for another way of instant messaging and to show off what your library is doing, the flickershow is the recommended tool. Sharepoint is another tool mentioned in the article, this tool can be excellent to make a connection between the library and the schools.
From Google, the author recommends two widgets: Google Calendar and Google Maps; he explains how easy is to embed them in a webpage. He also suggests that to share links through the library’s website , the linkroll option from del.icio.us is a good choice, and to display any RSS feeds a tool that can be used is Feed2JS.
As a final advise the author presents the point of where to paste the type of content and how to put them in practice to get the most benefit from them.
